This may be a waste of time to most people, but I’m curious. I recently read the Dialogues of Plato Version II and the Virtues were a large debate between Socrates and other members. Knowledge, courage, temperance, holiness, and wisdom are all mentioned (holiness being the least often shown up). I’ve been on websites and 10’s of 100’s of so called ‘‘virtues’’ have been discussed. Feel free to tell me & everyone your view of the most important or real virtue(s).
All of the stuff listed above can be either virtuous or viceous, depends on how are they employed in practise. True virtue is nothing but this: use your power to benifit others. Anything else is either vice or sublimated vice.
What is so called good? Power giving. Is the so called good meaningful of out this context: is it really worthy of prasing and worshiping?
What is so called bad? Power draining. Is the so called bad meaningful out of this context: is it really deserving of contempt and damnation?
Power demeans morality, it brings about the destruction of good and evil, virtue and vice - it’s beyond, truth - the ugly tapestry behind.
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So basically, I tried to be as close to Nietzsche as possible in your illusive concepts and its language, I probably did a bad job but your quatation of Nietzsche hardly contradicts my proper Nietzschean point. If you really believe that it does, then you might as well start from BT all over again…
Rami hi, as I said if you really wana a virtue just for a comfort, then believe that enpowering others at your own expense is one. No point getting nihilistic on this.
But Hume is… and Nietzsche stabed him hard in the ass, so I’m not surprised that you have a tendency to mis-understand Nietzsche.
But to end the joke: his words is there for intepretation, so it’s your words against mine - your interpretation agasinst mine - and I say that your interetation is a common error.
"6 It will be appreciated if I condense so essential and so new an insight into four theses. In that way I facilitate comprehension; in that way I provoke contradiction.
First proposition. The reasons for which “this” world has been characterized as “apparent” are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.
Second proposition. The criteria which have been bestowed on the “true being” of things are the criteria of not-being, of naught, the “true world” has been constructed out of contradiction to the actual world: indeed an apparent world, insofar as it is merely a moral-optical illusion.
Third proposition. To invent fables about a world “other” than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has gained the upper hand in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of “another,” a “better” life.
Fourth proposition. Any distinction between a “true” and an “apparent” world–whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant (in the end, an underhanded Christian)–is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of the decline of life. That the artist esteems appearance higher than reality is no objection to this proposition. For “appearance” in this case means reality once more, only by way of selection, reinforcement, and correction. The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible–he is Dionysian.
3 The error of a false causality. People have believed at all times that they knew what a cause is; but whence did we take our knowledge–or more precisely, our faith–that we had such knowledge? From the realm of the famous “inner facts,” of which not a single one has so far proved to be factual. We believed ourselves to be causal in the act of willing: we thought that here at least we caught causality in the act. Nor did one doubt that all the antecedents of an act, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness and would be found there once sought–as “motives”: else one would not have been free and responsible for it. Finally, who would have denied that a thought is caused? that the ego causes the thought?
Of these three “inward facts” which seem to guarantee causality, the first and most persuasive is that of the will as cause. The conception of a consciousness (“spirit”) as a cause, and later also that of the ego as cause (the “subject”), are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as given, as empirical.
Meanwhile we have thought better of it. Today we no longer believe a word of all this. The “inner world” is full of phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either–it merely accompanies events; it can also be absent. The so-called motive: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them. And as for the ego! That has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will!
What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all. The whole of the allegedly empirical evidence for that has gone to the devil. That is what follows! And what a fine abuse we had perpetrated with this “empirical evidence”; we created the world on this basis as a world of causes, a world of will, a world of spirits. The most ancient and enduring psychology was at work here and did not do anything else: all that happened was considered a doing, all doing the effect of a will; the world became to it a multiplicity of doers; a doer (a “subject”) was slipped under all that happened. It was out of himself that man projected his three “inner facts”–that in which he believed most firmly: the will, the spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being from the concept of the ego; he posited “things” as “being,” in his image, in accordance with his concept of the ego as a cause. Small wonder that later he always found in things only that which he gad put into them. The thing itself, to say it once more, the concept of thing is a mere reflex of the faith in the ego as cause. And even your atom, my dear mechanists and physicists–how much error, how much rudimentary psychology is still residual in your atom! Not to mention the “thing-in-itself,” the horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians! The error of the spirit as cause mistaken for reality! And made the very measure of reality! And called God!
4 The error of imaginary causes. To begin with dreams: ex post facto, a cause is slipped under a particular sensation (for example, one following a far-off cannon shot)–often a whole little novel in which the dreamer turns up as the protagonist. The sensation endures meanwhile in a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the causal instinct permits it to step into the foreground–now no longer as a chance occurrence, but as “meaning.” The cannon shot appears in a causal mode, in an apparent reversal of time. What is really later, the motivation, is experienced first–often with a hundred details which pass like lightning and the shot follows. What has happened? The representations which were produced by a certain state have been misunderstood as its causes.
In fact, we do the same thing when awake. Most of our general feelings–every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, and explosion in the play and counterplay of our organs, and particularly the state of the nervus sympaticus–excite our causal instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that–for feeling bad or for feeling good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only–become conscious of it only–when we have furnished some kind of motivation. Memory, which swings into action in such cases, unknown to us, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with them–not their real causes. The faith, to be sure, that such representations, such accompanying conscious processes are the causes is also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real cause–even precludes it.
there is far more of Nietzsche’s agreement with Hume here… (and this only scratches the surface of their agreements in one book)
nietzsche respected the nihilist? respect is hardly the word to use here. surely he saw something plausible in rationalists as he did in most everybody else, but eventually he surpassed them all by finding out each of their errors. nietzsche in my opinion, could only have had true respect towards the rather mystical ones such as heraclitus and dionysus. shall i give you a typical nietzschean egoistic quote to prove that? anything in ec ho will do really… anyway i was on morality, and i reckon you are out on that. thanks for the info on hume anyway
Not a virtue? What the?
Let’s have a look at a generic dictionary definition.
[b]
vir·tue ( P ) Pronunciation Key (vûrch)
n.
Moral excellence and righteousness; goodness.
An example or kind of moral excellence: the virtue of patience.
Chastity, especially in a woman.
A particularly efficacious, good, or beneficial quality; advantage: a plan with the virtue of being practical.
Effective force or power: believed in the virtue of prayer.
virtues Christianity. The fifth of the nine orders of angels in medieval angelology.
Obsolete. Manly courage; valor
[/b]
Ok definition one is meaningless, because what is ‘moral’ and ‘good’ are subjective value judgements.
Definition 2 is certainly mysogenistic…we’ll disregard it.
Definition 3 is a little more realistic and less abstract. I would definitely say ‘ambition’ would fit.
Definition 4 and 5 are worthless for all intents and purposes.
And who say’s a virtue can’t be a characture trait? Are you saying courage , confidence and wisdom are not also character traits?
And who get’s to define what is ‘good’?
You?
“could only have had true respect towards the rather mystical ones such as heraclitus and dionysus.”
Your grasp of Nietzsche is absolutely bizarre. Now you claim that Nietzsche only could have true respect for the “rather mystical ones”, while earlier you claimed he supported the rule of science in “absolute terms” . Do you just make up an interpretation of Nietzsche ad hoc? Nothing seems to constrain your interpretation, neither Nietzsche himself, nor you own past positions.
p.s. I hope you realize that Heraclitus was a person who actually wrote things, and Dionysus a god.
. Do you just make up an interpretation of Nietzsche ad hoc? Nothing seems to constrain your interpretation, neither Nietzsche himself, nor you own past positions. 
